the bells are ringing!

qualifications: nonbinary lesbian, college dropout, aria joie fanclub member, 40 days in the desert

[daxleopard]

Deep COUNTER/weight lore straight from the horse’s mouth

[guccigarantine]

happy 10 year anniversary to “fuck shit titties it’s friends at the table”

[bmure]

Leo and Jolyon, bunking off

[peacereturnedtothevalley]

The Six!

[bodyfrmabalcony]

that iconic friends at the table quote:

[kidworm]

console cowboy

[guccigarantine]

the onion skin: you just listen to the intros of every friends at the table episode in chronological order

[archipithecus]

this idea has stuck with me for two years. here's sangfielle, the rest will come soon

[archipithecus]

next is marielda, hi samol. i'm honestly not sure what to do about the winter and spring intros, because i've been mostly sticking to the bespoke austin intros, and skipping the "previously on" ones, but winter and spring mostly have "previously on" intros

[archipithecus]

this one took forever to put together and export and upload. not only is twilight mirage really long, 58 out of the total 67 episodes have bespoke austin intros. there are only a handful in the back half that have a "previously on"

[bmure]

Omerra Celendi of the Bell Metal Band

[sambeckdraws]

[awoooniper]

you know? 6 7 is kind of like Fourteen Fifteen for normal people.

[orbsoup]

Pickman…. i miss her…

[elemei]

The Marielda 10th Anniversary is almost upon us, and I am delighted to say that I've been collaborating with Friends at the Table and Lost in Cult to bring a very special edition of the Marielda Soundtrack to vinyl. It is Jack's wonderful tracks, it is art object illustrated by yours truly with concepts by Annie Johnston-Glick, it is another little story to unfold from our long beloved Hieron. You can now check it out here.

[laminatednewspaper]

You know how some people slap “not all those who wander are lost” on anything they can find and frame is as inspirational, not acknowledging it’s from lotr or about evil characters? I wanna get “we are the river and it is the sea, run to it or run dry but all will run” from Twilight Mirage as a tattoo and pretend it’s not said by the paint goop Iconoclasts.

[elemei]

Dreams & Visions, Ethan & Edmund, The Heat & The Dark

An illustration for a 2017 charity fan zine centered around Friends at the Table’s Marielda arc.

[pesti-devota-futurae]

lacuna mutata

[... ] a wonderful phrase

lacuna mutata

aint no [... ] craze

it means textual emendations

for the rest of your days

it's a source [...] free

ambiguity

lac[... ]

[clonerightsagenda]

Literary criticism terms I use on this blog despite making them up myself, much to the chagrin of anyone who does not have my back catalog memorized:

are we the baddies: SFF subgenre focused on agents of an imperial power realizing that and grappling with what to do next, in contrast to stories focusing on the scrappy rebels resisting said imperial power

I could fix him (the empire): SFF subgenre where the colonized subject being nice and/or sexy enough Ends Colonialism, frequently tied to the John President of Racism problem

librarian bait: books centered on the transformative life-changing power of books and libraries, cousin to books focused on the transformative life-changing power of storytelling and narrative in general

college brochure fiction: stories where the protagonist has an artfully arranged group of diverse friends who are as flat as paper and whose cultural backgrounds never come up meaningfully

the Dave Strider: character the fandom fixates on to the detriment of everything else, until the weight of that attention warps fanon and sometimes even canon around them. almost always male. it's happening to Gurathin from Murderbot right now

[clonerightsagenda]

#OP tell us more about the John President of Racism problem!

It hails from an immortal tumblr post by penultimate-step, except not immortal apparently because I get 'not found' when I try to go back to the original. So here's the text:

It's always disappointing when a series makes a big deal about societal and structural problems in it's setting, making readers think it has interesting things to say about the subject, only to then resolve the problems by fighting The CEO of Racism, John Racist, so that all of society's problems would then get better because they promoted a new CEO.

[catchaspark]

ceruleanvulpine replied to your post:

trope: trapped in an elevator

i love that FatT doesn’t have specific characters here it’s just. every FatT

I mean, like, of my favorite interactions in Counter/WEIGHT, which is the only canon with elevators except Marielda which wrote its own elevator slapstick:

Aria & Jacqui: Aria jumps up onto Jacqui’s shoulders and burns a hole in the ceiling, finding as she does that she’s totally right and it is an assassination attempt! The ensuing fight takes place over three different locations, all of which she destroys.

AuDy & anyone: Upon realizing that they are going to be trapped in an enclosed space with a sentient being, it is AuDy’s settled and considered practice to turn themselves off until the experience is over. If necessary, they will instead pretend to turn themselves off and play as many rounds of mental solitaire as is necessary until the other person stops trying to talk to them. This explains September.

Cass & Aria: Aria is about to shoot a hole in the ceiling to stop an assassination attempt when Cass blurts out that the elevator was programmed to stop halfway between the medical wing and the xenobiology wing! So that they can access the secret back access ladder! Aria is thrilled at this evidence of Cass’s foresight; Cass is thrilled that they’re at the point where they can just say whatever shit they want and their friends will buy it as a master plan.

Maryland and anyone: No elevator has ever broken down near Maryland.

Jace & Addax: Jace gets two lines into the “ha ha, guess we should wait for the rescue crew, anyway what’s your sign–” before Addax has already called on Peace to interface with the elevator and they are out of there. Addax gets all the way to Peace’s hangar before he slaps his forehead and turns around to try to get that precious, precious hitting-on time back, but it’s too late, it’s all too late in space. Life is a series of missed opportunities and connections. He turns it over and over in his mind, sometimes as a fantasy, sometimes as a sharp regret, until years later– when Jace is a figure out of time, resurrected and renewed, and Addax by some grace is sitting next to him in bed and going over his dissertation for punctuation errors– Jace is like, “oh, shit, do you know what I just remembered? That time I tried to hit on you in an elev–” and Addax blurts out “SAGITTARIUS.” 

Ibex & Orth: Orth chews off the elevator cable to escape